For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been on the hunt for a video game that can make life a little easier for me and the person I’m seeing. We’re a full continent away from each other, and the great 2020 plague has scuppered our most recent plans to visit each other. Whilst we’re constantly in contact in a way that I would find annoying if either of us were straight, we don’t really get to spend time doing things together.

That brings us to co-op video games. It was this or start a podcast, and honestly, the podcast thing still might happen. To narrow the field down, neither of us have a ton of money, so we were looking for something free-to-play. We looked over our options. World Of Warcraft these days is pretty expansive before you have to put any money into it, and We Were Here seems like an inventive puzzle take on the co-op game. 

After talking about it, we settled on Destiny 2. This is not a Destiny 2 review, though. That’s because we both spent three hours downloading the whopping 90gb that game takes up, only to find that for no reason at all, it doesn’t run on my person’s computer. “Well, that’s homophobic,” we joked irritably, before going to the back up option: Warframe.

Warframe is… hard to describe. Warframe is a free to play third-person shooter. It has been in open beta ever since its release by Digital Extremes in 2013. When a game is a whopping 7-years-old and still claiming beta status you start to wonder about the quality and the integrity of the game, but it’s pretty fun to play. It’s okay. I don’t think it’s anything special, but I don’t think it’s inherently irredeemable or awful, either.

The premise is pretty simple: you are a Tenno, a member of a class of ancient warriors who have awoken in our solar system. You’re a good guy. It’s your job to shoot up the bad guys. The lore can be deepened by reading codex entries, but I would firmly describe Warframe as just not that deep. It doesn’t need to be. That’s fine. The game’s title comes from the suits that the Tenno wear known as warframes. Warframes are bio-mechanical armor with different sets of power.

They can be modded and changed through items dropped during game missions, or purchased from the marketplace. You can purchase more frames from the same marketplace. In game, you use energy to activate your warframe’s powers. The energy is in short supply, and is easily dried up. That leaves you fighting with weapons. Primary, secondary and melee tools are at your disposal including various kinds of guns, bows, throwing knives, staves, and swords.

As a frame of reference, I’ve put about ten hours into Warframe so far, and I think the most disappointing aspect of the gameplay mechanics is that there’s not really a marked, distinct difference between all of these styles. Between bows, rifles, pistols, and knives; there’s just not a lot of change between the weapons except for the element of noise. 

Even then, I’ve been playing with a bow primarily and I wonder how much less subtle a rifle would be, given that the enemy AI in this game is about as intelligent as a box of rocks. You can be looking directly at an enemy and take your sweet time lining up a perfect headshot and simply not get noticed. Stealth bonus? Really? For walking up to a guy and shooting him directly in the face? Well… alright then. Whatever you say.

This isn’t to say it’s not a fun game, though. It’s exactly the kind of game that we were after in looking for a co-op game. We boot it up, start a discord call so we can talk, and jump into a mission together without a lot of forethought. The missions are procedurally generated, so the level layouts are never quite the same, though they often have repeating segments. We can play for four hours or twenty minutes depending on the mood that we’re in. It’s the perfect hang-out-and-talk game, in that sense, and it doesn’t require a whole lot of skill or focus in order to have fun. 

I enjoy the lack of depth. It reminds me of Overwatch in that sense, where you can jump in and not be committed to a quest storyline. You can be there purely just to have fun and goof off for a while. It’s a great game to switch your brain off whilst playing and just… go. I love that about it. 

I have a million single-player and deep story-lead games I could play, and Warframe understands that’s not what the players are here for. Warframe gets that I’m here to spend time with other people and also listen to the confused, glitchy ramblings of my ship’s artificial intelligence as it tells me that it has been counting the stars and wanted to let me know.

My favorite word is back though, janky. I wonder how many times it shows up in my reviews when I’m trying to be nice about wonky or ineffectual mechanics. Aside from the enemies being stupid as hell, there are some alien dogs that really enjoy growling at you. It’s the same looping growl noise effect, and all of them make it, at the exact same time and at the same pace. You walk into an area and from the volume think you might be about to encounter some huge, hulking beast. No, it’s just four small, annoying dogs.

There is a lack of clarity when connection issues rise.  When my person is stuck in loading areas, there’s no clarity that a connection issue is the cause. The game also just starts missions without everyone in the room present. I would sometimes end up in a firefight when my squad members hadn’t loaded in yet. On another occasion my internet was playing up, and the squad was kicked apart and disbanded. No notification or information from the game was given. It just happened, and suddenly we were both playing solo.

The game also explains absolutely nothing to you. I shouldn’t have to sit there reading guides about how to do anything more complicated than join a mission. On top of that I shouldn’t have to guess and poke around to figure out what missions are just for fun and what ones are events or storyline-related. I’m not a smart person, and I like my hand to be held until I’ve gotten an understanding of the way the game works. 

This isn’t a Warframe exclusive issue, though; MMOs in general are a big fan of dropping you more or less in the deep end. I was deeply confused by my brief experience with Destiny 2 for the same reasons. These games pick you up, walk you through a vague story prologue, and then just kind of toss you into the wild. I’m like a baby, video game. I can’t even crawl yet and you’re asking me to run.

The music in the game is pretty basic, atmospheric, and fun. Sadly, it slides towards annoying if for any reason you need to sit in (for example) the login screen any longer than 10 seconds. Any time you’re forced to pay attention to the music, you realize it’s only good when it’s in the very far background. I’ve now reached the point where if I’m playing Warframe alone, I just switch the in-game music off and stick on my own.

Now, if you think I haven’t shredded the game enough, welcome to the wealth of criticism I have for the game’s model. Warframe is exactly the nightmare of microtransactions and grinding that you would expect any free-to-play game to be. You can’t buy warframes or nearly anything else on the marketplace outright with the in-game currency, credits. To purchase most things you need platinum, the premium currency you can only get through paying real money or trading in-game. 

You can use your credits instead to buy blueprints. Blueprints means grinding, relying on drops, and hours after hours sunk into the game before you can get any meaningful drops out of it. Even trading for platinum is affected by the microtransactions that keep the game afloat. Let me tell you about my experience with what I think is some of the most egregious blockading I’ve seen in some time.

My brother wanted to trade his platinum to me because he no longer plays Warframe. To trade, you either need to go to a specific in-game location or be part of a clan. This in-game location was not available to me, so I made a clan and invited him and my person. Now that I’ve made the clan, I needed to go to the clan dojo; but wait to enter the clan dojo, you need to craft the key. To craft the key, you need the required resources and to wait twelve hours whilst the game makes it for you. Of course, you can speed this up with platinum.

Twelve hours later, I head into the dojo. I went to place a trading post. I place a trading post, and It requires resources to build. In a mechanic I think is actually pretty interesting, all members of a clan can contribute resources to the things you want to put in your dojo. So me and my brother contribute to this trading post. We’re missing a key resource that none of us have, which is annoying. Okay, fine. How do we get it?

Well, for that item you needed to have a Void Relic which is obtained by grinding. You then need to carry out Void Fissure missions in order to grind for the materials to open the Void Relic. After completing a mission you can open the Void Relic, at which point you’ll get a random chance of getting the exact resource you want. 

If you don’t get what you want, you need more Void Relics that drop what you’re after. You need to run more Void Fissures. You run them over and over in the hopes of getting one measly object just to create a trading post with. When I eventually found this resource, it took 24 hours to make the trading post itself. Though of course, if I bought some platinum, I could rush that job. Holy crap, man. 

It’s anti-player and anti-community. It is very pro-capitalism, though. Everything about this process says that the developers would much rather you just bought what you’re after with your own money, instead of trading for it with other players. It shouldn’t have been so difficult to try and set up trading. You can’t even send gifts to other players in the game unless you’re buying them directly from the marketplace.

It has been a long time since I’ve played a free-to-play game. For that reason I’m happy to admit I could be just unused to the way the game works. I do play Animal Crossing, though, which is equally thrilled to waste your time at literally any given opportunity and makes you grind for resources like there’s no tomorrow. That’s the designed pace of Animal Crossing, though: take your time. Relax. Work for what you want. That is not Warframe’s design, which is geared to frustrate the player into spending real money.

Playing Warframe and dealing with the issues of predatory micro-transactions feels pertinent right now, as my country pushes to class loot boxes as gambling. Warframe doesn’t randomize the results of what you spend money on. However, the same issues are present: an environment telling you that the best way to play the game is to spend money. 

It’s how you get the cool things, man. It’s how you become one of the cool kids. It’s a potent dose of FOMO that snares “whales”, the people these free-to-play models are geared towards. People who are willing to spend large amounts of money on the game every month. 

Warframe does have some scruples though. Unlike many other free-to-play games, you don’t stop being able to play just because you run into a resourcing issue as I have with my trading post. That said, the overall leveling system known as the mastery rank, can only be increased by ranking up different warframes and weapons. Each frame or weapon has a maximum rank, so eventually you have to grind for more components for more warframes to increase your mastery rank. At the same time, your inventory has a limited number of slots for warframes or weapons. You can increase those slots, if you want. Guess how. Go on. Guess. It starts with p and ends with urchase platinum by opening your wallet.

This isn’t to say the developers don’t deserve money. Of course they do. They’ve crafted a game that is fun to play, and free, and keeping servers for this kind of game running has to be expensive. Not to mention that the developers absolutely deserve to be able to put food on their tables. Does it justify the model of a free-to-play game, when these games are rarely truly free, instead relying on player exploitation to make money?

I don’t know. I would rather pay £50 for a game that I only need to grind for in-game currency or experience points in than repeatedly dole out money to get the most basic things in this free game. If Warframe dropped platinum as a concept tomorrow and instead asked players to pay a subscription fee, I think it would be a better game for it.

It’s frustrating to write a review of a game that I genuinely enjoy while detailing this many problems with it. I do genuinely enjoy it. It’s a blast to just play, and it’s the best free option I have right now for getting in some outright fun with the far-away person I care about. At the same time, the first message I sent them this morning was, “I think I might actually hate Warframe.” I mentioned to them I had plans to channel all those feelings into a Warframe review… and then I asked if they were free to play it later. That’s the relationship I have with this game: it’s a complete joy, except for all the times it’s not. 

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Warframe

5.5

Score

5.5/10

Pros

• Fun, energetic gameplay
• Free to play

Cons

• Microtransactions pushed on you
• 7 years in beta feels like an excuse
• Lousy enemy AI